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About Paleo Retiree

Onetime media flunky and movie buff and very glad to have left that mess behind. Formerly Michael Blowhard of the cultureblog 2Blowhards.com. Now a rootless parasite and bon vivant on a quest to find the perfectly-crafted artisanal cocktail.

5 Responses to Linkage

Crows are awesome! They are incredibly bright; if you harass one of them, they’ll alert all the others around, and they’ll all remember you even years later, warn the others again and swoop at you; and it is claimed that they somehow pass this warning about particular people on to their offspring!

That post from Radix should have been titled “Viewing Stoicism from the Dank Basement”. If anything, they are talking about the Cynics, and later related movements from Northern / Eastern Europe like Jansenism.

There’s only the most superficial awareness of what the Stoics thought, did, and advocated — “being in control of your emotions,” something that anyone with a decent vocabulary would already know.

They didn’t bother reading any Stoic authors, books on those authors, or indeed glance over the Wikipedia article. The post writer wants an ideology that will allow him to use his resentment and rage over past injustices to motivate him in the struggle of the future, but part of Stoicism is not being a slave to your emotions, so it is necessary to invent some ridiculous system with the label “Stoicism” and reject it.

Phew, I was getting nervous that this whole “virtuous living” thing was going to prevent me from stewing in my impotent revenge fantasies!

Speaking of which, where are the four cardinal Virtues of Stoicism in that post? Or their counterparts, the Vices. Oh right, the only meaningful advice they had to offer was “don’t let this random shitty world get you down”.

For the internet nerd, the only possible value to be found in Stoicism is a practice-makes-perfect method for not pissing your pants when Netflix removes that one movie from its library that you’ve been meaning to watch since forever.

Stoicism fosters isolated individualism and lack of regard for one’s ethnic group, culture, and society — I guess that’s what made it reach its peak under the Roman Empire at its most cohesive in the 2nd century. What an utter dipshit.

The greatest example of a Stoic philosopher alive today is Nassim Taleb. If you’re at all familiar with his worldview, that’s what Stoicism is all about. Ignore what nerds have to say.

Also worth bearing in mind that Stoicism is exotic and unfamiliar to those whose roots lie outside of the Mediterranean (Taleb is Lebanese). We shouldn’t presume to know all about it from an SAT flashcard we memorized, anymore than the Greeks would be experts on Puritanism from having learned that vocabulary-building word.